Selected Polish Tales Part 24

'Wouldn't you like to rest and have something to eat after your long journey?' inquired Slimak.

'I don't want anything to eat, but my father would like some milk.'

'Run and get some milk, Jendrek,' cried Slimak.

'Meaning no offence,' said Slimakowa, 'but you Germans can't have a country of your own, or else you wouldn't come here.'

'This is our home,' the girl replied. 'I was born in this country, the other side of the Vistula.'

Her father made an impatient movement and said in a broken voice: 'We Germans have a country of our own, larger than yours, but it's not pleasant to live in: too many people, too little land; it's difficult to make a living, and we have to pay heavy taxes and do hard military service, and there are penalties for everything.'

He coughed and continued after a pause: 'Everybody wants to be comfortable and live as he pleases, and not as others tell him. It's not pleasant to live in our country, so we've come here.'

Jendrek brought the milk and offered it to the girl, who gave it to her father.

'G.o.d repay you!' sighed the invalid; 'the people in this country are kind.'

'I wish you would not do us harm,' said Slimakowa in a half-whisper.

'Why should we do you harm?' said the man. 'Do we take your land? do we steal? do we murder you? We are quiet people, we get in n.o.body's way so long as n.o.body gets...'

'You have bought the land here,' Slimak interrupted.

'But why did your squire sell it to us? If thirty peasants had been settled here instead of one man, who did nothing but squander his money, our people would not have come. Why did not you yourselves form a community and buy the village? Your money would have been as good as ours. You have been settled here for ages, but the colonists had to come in before you troubled about the land, and then no sooner have they bought it than they become a stumbling-block to you! Why wasn't the squire a stumbling-block to you?'

Breathless, he paused and looked at his wasted arms, then continued: 'To whom is it that the colonists resell their land? To you peasants!

On the other side of the Vistula[1] the peasants bought up every sc.r.a.p of our land.'

[Footnote 1: i.e. in Prussian Poland. One of the Polish people's grievances is that the large properties are not sold direct to them but to the colonists, and the peasants have to buy the land from them.

Statistics show that in spite of the great activity of the German Colonization Commission more and more land is constantly acquired by the Polish peasants, who hold on to the land tenaciously.]

'One of your lot is always after me to sell him my land,' said Slimak.

'To think of such a thing!' interposed his wife. 'Who is he?'

'How should I know? there are two of them, and they came twice, an old man and one with a beard. They want my hill to put up a windmill, they say.'

'That's Hamer,' said the girl under her breath to her father.

'Oh, Hamer,' repeated the invalid, 'he has caused us difficulties enough. Our people wanted to go to the other side of the Bug, where land only costs thirty roubles an acre, but he persuaded them to come here, because they are building a railway across the valley. So our people have been buying land here at seventy roubles an acre and have been running into debt with the Jew, and we shall see what comes of it.'

The girl meanwhile had been eating coa.r.s.e bread, sharing it with the dog. She now looked across to where the colonists were spreading themselves over the fields.

'We must go, father,' she said.

'Yes, we must go; what do I owe you for the milk, gospodarz?'

The peasant shrugged his shoulders.

'If we were obliged to take money for a little thing like that, I shouldn't have asked you.'

'Well, G.o.d repay you!'

'G.o.d speed you,' said Slimak and his wife.

'Strange folk, those Germans,' he said, when they had slowly moved off.

'He is a clever man, yet he goes about in that little cart like an old beggar.'

'And the girl!' said Slimakowa, 'whoever heard of dragging an old man about, as if you were a horse.'

'They're not bad,' said Slimak, returning to his cottage.

The conversation with the Germans had rea.s.sured him that they were not as terrible as he had fancied.

When Maciek went out after breakfast to plough the potato-fields, Slimak slipped off.

'You've got to put up the fence!' his wife called out after him.

'That won't run away,' he answered, and banged the door, fearful lest his wife should detain him.

He crouched as he ran through the yard, wis.h.i.+ng to attract her attention as little as possible, and went stealthily up the hill to where Maciek was perspiring over his ploughing.

'How about those Swabians?' asked the labourer.

Slimak sat down on the slope so that he could not be seen from the cottage, and pulled out his pipe.

'You might sit over there,' Maciek said, pointing with his whip to a raised place; 'then I could smell the smoke.'

'What's the good of the smoke to you? I'll give you my pipe to finish, and meanwhile it does not grieve the old woman to see me sitting here wasting my time.' He lit his pipe very deliberately, rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and looked into the valley, watching the crowd of Germans.

With their covered carts they had enclosed a square into which they had driven their cattle and horses; inside and outside of this the people were bustling about. Some put a portable manger on a stand and fed the cows, others ran to the river with buckets. The women brought out their saucepans and little sacks of vegetables and a crowd of children ran down the ravine for fuel.

'What crowds of children they have!' said Slimak; 'we have not as many in the whole village.'

'Thick as lice,' said Maciek.

Slimak could not wonder enough. Yesterday the field had been empty and quiet, to-day it was like a fair. People by the river, people in the ravines, people on the fields, who chop the bushes, carry wood, make fires, feed and water the animals! One man had already opened a retail-shop on a cart and was obviously doing good business. The women were pressing round him, buying salt, sugar, vinegar. Some young mothers had made cradles of shawls, suspended on short pitchforks, and while they were cooking with one hand they rocked the cradle with the other. There was a veterinary surgeon, too, who examined the foot of a lame horse, and a barber was shaving an old Swabian on the step of his cart.

'Do you notice how quickly they work? It's farther for them to fetch the firewood than for us, yet we take half the day over it and they do it before you can say two prayers.'

'Oh! oh!' said Maciek, who seemed to feel this remark as an aspersion.

'But, then, they work together, 'continued Slimak; 'when our people go out in a crowd every one attends to his own business, and rests when he likes or gets into the way of the others. But these dogs work together as if they were used to each other; if one of them were to lie down on the ground the others would cram work into his hand and stand over him till he had finished it. Watch them yourself.'

He gave his pipe to Maciek and returned to the cottage.

'They are quick folk, those Swabians,' he muttered, 'and clever!'

Within half an hour he had discovered the two secrets of modern work: organization and speed.